Margaret Laurence Lecture: Hugh MacLennan, 1987

In a letter to
Marian Engel, Hugh MacLennan wrote: ““But factually I’m fifty, even though
my economic status is no more secure than than of the average McGill
engineering graduate. But time, the ability at last to become accustomed to it,
to measure its power and effects – there’s no doubt of it, a novelist needs
that. A woman novelist, oddly, needs it much less than a man. That is because a
woman of 20, if she’s intelligent, is basically more mature than an intelligent
man of 30.”

It was 1957. Thirty
years later, he is eighty years old and delivering the first of the Margaret
Laurence lectures.

“It seems a
grim jest of God that she should be gone and I should be here, for I was born
some eighteen years before she came into the world.”

Because I am less
familiar with his works and more familiar with Laurence’s, I enjoyed the first
part of the piece more. (And it was particularly fine to discover a reference
to the importance of both Laurence and Gabrielle Roy to the Manitoba letters
scene, as I have been systematically reading through Roy’s works over the past
year.)

His piece is
preoccupied with time, as suits an octogenarian speaker, and it is interesting
to read his perspective on the relationships between nations.

“Sometimes
people ask, ‘What is the difference between Canada and the United States apart
from the climates?’ Historically and psychologically there are very great
differences. Until the long debacle in Vietnam, the Americans had never lost a
war against a foreign power. But the ancestors of nearly all Canadians were
losers.”

His experience
being a writer stretched from Princeton to Oxford, from Halifax to Germany; he
literally ran into Einstein walking on campus and compares the prices of orange
juice and hot dogs across the decades. As one would expect, even only having
read Two Solitudes, there is much to consider about national identities and
conflicts large and small.

MacLennan has
nothing to say about his writing process or whether he liked to read in the
mornings or in the evenings. He looked outward as much as he looked inward.

Ulitmately, however, the piece left me wanting to read his last novel, to which he refers as having taken him six years to write, Voices in Time. And his discussion of the introduction of a Metis writer, to the pages of Margaret Laurence’s fiction, made me want to reread The Diviners.